Enclosures for refrigeration controllers

A supermarket chain's refrigeration equipment depended on controllers whose manufacturer no longer offers enclosure spares. It's a known trap of long-lived industrial equipment: the electronics outlive their own body. The enclosures were damaged, the controller inside kept working, and replacing entire units over a plastic part was not a reasonable option.

We scanned an original enclosure with a 3D scanner and worked on the digital model: repairing the damage and rebuilding the geometry until we had a corrected replica, ready to manufacture. Reverse engineering is exactly this — when the original drawing doesn't exist, you recover it from the part.

The replicas were printed in ABS, a technical plastic that stands up to machine-room conditions. Each piece took around three days to print: fifteen units isn't a factory run, it's shop patience — the exact quantity needed, with no molds, no minimums, and no waiting on a supplier that no longer exists.

All fifteen enclosures are installed and the controllers keep reading temperatures and driving compressors as if nothing had happened. The spare that's no longer manufactured now exists again — and the file stays on record, in case fifteen more are ever needed.

3D SCANNING · 3D PRINTING · ABS · REVERSE ENGINEERING